You encounter broken images and an rld2 or rld3 error

Some folks using PowerPoint 2016, PowerPoint 2013, or PowerPoint 2016 for Mac have encountered a problem in which pictures that previously appeared as expected on a slide suddenly are not visible. Instead a red X (or a white square) appears along with an error message that says:

The image part with relationship ID rld2 [or rld3] was not found in the file

Causes of the error

There appears to be more than one cause for this error. One cause we have been able to reproduce and fix has to do with saving a presentation on removable media, such as a USB flash drive.

On PowerPoint 2016 for Mac, another cause has to do with saving a presentation on a mounted network drive (AFP, NFS, SMB); this cause has also been fixed.

Solution

The corrections for the causes named above have been released in the following versions of PowerPoint:

Product

Version

PowerPoint 2016

1703, Build 7967 (for most consumers)

1701, Build 7766 (for many commercial customers)

PowerPoint 2013

15.0.4919.1002

PowerPoint 2016 for Mac

15.34.17051500

You can update to the latest build by going to Help > Check for Updates from any of the Office 2016 apps.

Having the updated version of the product should prevent you from experiencing this problem in the future, but it won't repair missing images that you already have. You'll have to reinsert missing images manually.

We need your help

We continue to hear reports periodically about this problem, so we think there are other causes that we need to diagnose and fix. If you encounter this problem, but are not using a removable drive, we want to hear from you. Please contact us via the "smiley face" icon in the upper-right corner of PowerPoint, including as much information as possible about your images and file.